The Debian images on the Amazon cloud are of the "minbase" variant, and extra
packages are added. (James, I lost track on where to find this information in
the source code of bootstrap-vz, or on the Debian wiki, can you remind me the
information ?) For the other cloud images, I am not familiar enough to be sure
if they also use debootstrap's minbase variant or not. They will also install
extra packages, some platform-specific, and some common with the other images.

Configuration of packages included in images made by bootstrap-vz are in
the manifest file (eg manifests/official/ec2/...) for the image being
generated. It's a simple YAML file that you add the lines of what
additional package(s) you want in their own base image.

Hi James,
I do not see python-boto, awscli, etc in `manifests/official/ec2/ebs-jessie-amd64-hvm.yml`.
Am I searching in the wrong place, or are you using ad-hoc command-line arguments ?
Cheers,